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First, Happy Canada Day to everyone in Canada, and early Fourth of July wishes to everyone in the US. I'll be celebrating over here in Britain, fireworks and all. And condolences to readers in England on yesterday's World Cup loss -- but what a game! And I'm not even a fan

I'm about halfway through a series of site updates, which has included organizing articles from past newsletters by subject, which should make it easier to locate the latest news or to read up on past developments.

Netscape is promising that the next version of its browser will be bright enough to help users find what they are looking for. "Smart Browsing" will be available in the beta version of Communicator 4.5, to be released sometime in July.

"The idea behind Smart Browsing is that we are trying to add intelligence to the browsing process" Micki Seibel, Netscape Communicator's Senior Product Manager.

One of the best things about the announcement is that it gives a name to features that already exist in both Netscape and Internet Explorer, which will raise awareness of these helpful options.

Netscape's Smart Browsing will initially contain three core components: Internet Keywords, What's Related and NetWatch. The first is a search feature; the second a site discovery tool, and the third is a filtering mechanism.

With Internet Keywords, you can enter search terms into the Location area of the browser and be taken to relevant pages.

You can already see this in action using Communicator 4. Enter any phrase that is two words or longer, and you'll receive results from Netscape's Excite-powered search engine. Similarly, you can perform one-word searches by prefacing the word with either a ? symbol or the word "go," such as "? cars" or "go cars."

The same functionality has been present in Internet Explorer since the IE3 release. It works exactly the same as described above in both IE3 and IE4, and results come from Yahoo, by default.

Those who have installed the Windows 95 or Windows 98 Tweak UI applet can switch the default to another service via the drop down box in the Internet Explorer section of the General tab. Oddly, both versions of Tweak UI still include services such as the now defunct Open Text Index or Infoseek Ultra, which has long been absorbed into the main Infoseek service.

So what's new about Netscape's Internet Keywords? For one, there will be an option to disable Netscape's auto-completion attempts. This is another existing feature in both the Netscape and Microsoft browsers that remains unknown to some users.

With auto-completion, a browser will attempt to add missing portions of a URL in order to reach a site. For example, enter "www.website.com," and both browsers will transform this to "http://www.website.com." So save your fingers and stop entering those http:// prefixes!

Likewise, if you leave off the .com suffix, the browsers will add them or rotate through other options, such as .net. Unlike the http:// prefix, it's best to add the correct suffix, if you know it. Otherwise, you could end up at the wrong site.

Disabling auto-completion is important, because it will allow users to use the Location box the way they use the search box at search engines. There will be no need to prefix one-word searches, as described above. Instead, users can just enter anything into the box, hit return and get results similar to using a search engine.

The results won't be exactly the same as using a search engine, however. There will be a series of "reserve names" that will take users directly to a web site. For example, entering "Amazon" might take users to the Amazon.com web site, while entering Barnes & Noble might take them to that bookseller's site.

Isn't this what RealNames is supposed to do? Yes, the ideas are virtually identical. Users can enter words, rather than URLs, to reach the sites they are looking for. The difference is that Netscape doesn't plan to charge companies to be listed in its reserve word database, which currently has about one million entries, Seibel said.

Instead, editors will add terms to the database, and site owners can also request to be added for free. Seibel expects that there will be some type of formal submission process after the new system goes live.

Another key difference is that Netscape will resolve generic terms. Enter something like "autos," and you'll be taken to a relevant page with Netscape Netcenter. In contrast, RealNames will not register a generic phrase to any particular site.

Netscape also plans to resolve some generic and semi-generic terms to particular sites outside of Netcenter. For example, "white house" would take you to the US White House site, under Netscape's plan.

An innovative feature is the eventual introduction of international sets of reserve words. This would be an excellent way of solving the problem of companies in different countries having the same name. Enter "ford" into Netscape's US-edition browser, and you would be taken to the Ford US site. Do the same using its UK-edition browser, and you might be taken to the Ford UK site.

Many searches won't match the Netscape's reserve word database, of course. In these cases, users will be presented with matching pages from the Netscape search engine, as happens now.

Does this mean RealNames has no hope of getting built into future Netscape browsers, a key strategy of that company's plans? Netscape says its Smart Browsing doesn't preclude working with third parties, and RealNames says discussions are on going. So, wait and see.

What's Related is the second component of Netscape's Smart Browsing. It's a site discovery feature based on technology from Alexa. A small drop down box next to the Location box will list sites that have content similar to the site currently being visited.

Netscape's What's Related database is built in partnership with Alexa, but the results will not be exactly the same as those presented by Alexa's own software. Instead, Netscape will be adding its own editorial suggestions and enhancements, Seibel said.

Meanwhile, IE4 users can enjoy a similar What's Related integration and more via a new 45K Alexa download that seamlessly adds Alexa features to the browser. For more details, see the separate article on the Alexa 2.0 release.

Finally, the NetWatch component of Smart Browsing will allow parents, teachers or others to configure the browser so that it cannot reach sites with possibly objectionable material, based on PICS ratings. A similar feature is available in Internet Explorer, via the Internet Options menu. Choose the "Security" tag in IE3 or the "Content" tag in IE4, then select the Content Advisor section.

A few months ago, I got a message from a teacher desperate to find some kid-friendly search services. She had done a search on a seemingly innocent topic in front of her classroom, only to have sites pitching pornography appear in the top results. She was anxious to avoid a repeat performance.

There's good news for her, along with other educators and parents who want search results appropriate for children. Three new services offer children a safer way to search the web.

Two were introduced in June: Lycos SafetyNet and the Disney Internet Guide, or DIG for short. Another new comer is Ask Jeeves For Kids, which launched in March.

Lycos SafetyNet is a system that uses filtering technology to help prevent possibly objectionable web sites from appearing in its results. This is a first among the major crawler-based search engines.

Crawler-based services like Lycos, AltaVista, Excite and Infoseek create their listings by visiting web pages and indexing the text they find on them. The problem with this is that they can be easier to trick than web guides compiled by humans, such as Yahoo and LookSmart.

For example, some porn sites place misleading text on their pages to fool search engine crawlers into thinking they are relevant for popular topics. In other cases, a site may indeed be relevant for a term, but relevant to adults, not children.

To see this in action, perform a search for "toys," "chicks" or "spice girls" on any of the major search engines, and you'll probably see some adult sites among the top results. You may also see some adult-oriented banner ads.

A Cyber Dialogue study conducted for Lycos found 67 percent of those surveyed wanted the ability to block adult sites from search results when their children are using the computer. In response to this and other concerns, Lycos created SafetyNet. It was quietly launched a few weeks ago, but Lycos made a public announcement on June 29.

Activating SafetyNet is easy. You visit the SafetyNet home page and fill out a small form, which includes assigning a password for altering SafetyNet settings.

At its basic setting, SafetyNet will filter objectionable material from the top search results and prevent adult-oriented ads from loading. At a higher level, SafetyNet will also block access to Lycos chat areas, email and message boards.

SafetyNet settings are stored in a cookie on the computer, so that it remembers whether filtering has been switched on. It can be turned off at any time, as long as the proper password is provided. Click on the SafetyNet logo, which appears in the upper-right hand side of the search results screen, to reach the SafetyNet control panel.

The system works by detecting pages that contain words and word syntax common to adult or objectionable material. These pages are then pushed to the end of the results, where they are unlikely to be found.

For example, a Lycos search for "kate winslett" without SafetyNet brings up numerous sites offering nude pictures of the actress in the top results. With SafetyNet on, these nude sites disappear from the top ten.

Lycos readily admits that SafetyNet is not perfect. Some objectionable sites may still slip through, and a smart kid can certainly figure out how to delete the cookie. Also, access to its dynamically created directory remains, where some adult content could be listed.

"Originally, we wanted a foolproof system," said Lycos Product Manager Rajive Mathur. "But on the Internet, there's no way to get that without sending an army of people to scrub each result."

The key is that SafetyNet greatly lessens the odds of an unexpected, and unwanted, surprise. It gives parents and others an easy, first line of defense, which they can further supplement with a software filtering solution, if desired.

Overall, SafetyNet is an excellent enhancement for those parents and educators who use Lycos already, because they consistently like the results it returns. It offers a way to make their favorite service kid-friendly.

SafetyNet is also a good alternative for those who've tried searching at kid-friendly directories such as Yahooligans but failed to find what they wanted. That's because Lycos, being a crawler-based service, may have more comprehensive coverage for particular types of searches.

For best success, it's also important to understand when not to use SafetyNet.

When SafetyNet is on, you can't search for some words at all. Search for "sex," and you'll be told nothing could be found. Look for "sex education," and you're essentially doing a search for "education," as the term "sex" will be ignored. Likewise, birdwatchers looking for information on "blue tits" are really only searching for "blue."

So, when looking for material with possible adult connotations, or when using terms that include sexual or possibly objectionable words, push the kids out of the room and turn SafetyNet off. You'll get much better results. With it on, you'll probably get frustrated.

Likewise, turn SafetyNet off if your searches don't seem to turn up any good matches. You may be using a term that is filtered out because of connotations you don't realize exist.

In contrast to Lycos SafetyNet, Disney has taken a tried-and-tested approach of handpicking sites for inclusion in its new DIG service.

This is filtering by humans, rather than machines. The advantage is that humans usually do a better job in categorizing the web, so you can expect the Disney guide to be a good starting place for kids to explore the web. The same is true for Yahooligans, the long-established children's directory from Yahoo.

Directories are an especially good place to begin searching when your topic is broad, such as "travel" or "sports." This is because you'll find often discover categories that help you narrow your focus.

The Disney guide is produced in partnership with Inktomi, which provides results to HotBot and powers supplemental results to Yahoo and Snap. However, Inktomi is doing something different with Disney. Its technology is being used both to provide matching pages from a select set of web sites and to also help organize those sites into categories, according to Kevin Brown, Inktomi's marketing director.

This categorization is something Inktomi has not previously done with its other partners, but the company can't say more about it at the moment, Brown said.

It's also uncertain what will happen in the wake of Disney's new stake in Infoseek. It seems likely that Inktomi will continue to power DIG, especially in light of the specialty service it is providing.

The third entry is based on Ask Jeeves, a unique search service that lists questions its thinks you want answered in response to a search, then takes you to web pages that answer those questions.

For example, enter "world cup," and it will display results like "Where can I find the latest news about the 1998 World Cup" or "Where can I find a list of the all-time best players in international soccer." Clicking on the Ask Jeeves logo next to each question takes you to a relevant web site with the answers.

Ask Jeeves For Kids follows the same model, but results are oriented for children. My favorite response was when I tested a search for "sex." Ask Jeeves responds with "Where do babies come from?"

The regular Ask Jeeves service also acts as a metacrawler, presenting results from several of the major search services below its own answers. Ask Jeeves For Kids provides the same functionality, but it filters out any objectionable sites that are on SurfWatch's block list.

Pay-for-placement search service GoTo.com hit both advertising and traffic milestones in June, while also enhancing its search results.

The service announced that more than 1,000 sites are now paying for prominent placement at the top of its search results, and that it has begun serving a million page views a day, thanks to a new publicity campaign.

GoTo also enhanced its results by partnering with Inktomi, while adding new directory listings and a browser-based way to drill down into the service.

GoTo switched to a pay-for-placement model in February. Advertisers can open accounts and bid on how much they'll pay to appear at the top of results in response to specific searches. Advertisers are currently paying anywhere from one cent to one dollar a click, GoTo says.

"We could have signed up perhaps more advertisers over this time period, but we've been laying the groundwork to scale up to 10,000 advertisers," said CEO Jeffrey Brewer.

Part of the groundwork has been educating advertisers to write appropriate descriptions for their paid links and to ensure that those links take users to the most appropriate sections of their sites, Brewer said.

GoTo has also ramped up its publicity campaign in recent weeks, which it says has increased traffic to the site. Banner ads began running in key places such as the Netscape Net Search page, GeoCities and LookSmart. Ads will soon begin at Microsoft and Lycos. The company also has radio and outdoor campaigns planned.

All those new visitors are finding a greatly improved service, thanks to a partnership with Inktomi.

Previously, GoTo's non-paid results had come from the World Wide Web Worm crawler that GoTo acquired for its original launch in 1997. Those results were looking decidedly dated. When Inktomi took over in late May, they immediately improved.

Of course, GoTo's model is based on the idea that its paid listings will make it more relevant than other services, especially for general searches. Cash equals quality is the theory, and web sites that pay more are probably better sites, GoTo feels. Ultimately, the accuracy of this remains with each individual user.

What is significant is that there have been no great outcries or bad publicity about GoTo's pay-for-placement model, as had accompanied the last great experiment with paid listings by Open Text back in 1996.

Perhaps the web has matured, and these type of economic models are more acceptable. Perhaps as GoTo founder Bill Gross originally speculated at the launch earlier this year, GoTo would succeed because as a relatively new service, it had no reputation to taint with paid listings.

Or perhaps it is what Brewer thinks: no one cares how the results are determined, as long as they personally find them relevant.

"Quite frankly, there's no understanding of how any service provides results," Brewer said. "If consumers are satisfied, they really are not interested in the mechanism."

In other search changes, GoTo has introduced "Related Searches" categories at the top of some search results pages. For example, a search for cars suggests checking "used cars" or "auto parts," among other options.

GoTo is also planning to allow a second page of results to appear on the service. Currently, a search brings up 40 matches on a single page, with no way to request more.

Some users have requested the ability to dig deeper, and some popular categories such as "hardware" and "web hosting" now have so many paid listings that a second page option will soon be necessary to accommodate more.

Much is being made over two traditional media players, Disney and NBC, making investments into the new media players of Infoseek and Cnet's Snap. It's added more hype to portal mania that is sweeping the web, or at least various online news services.

Disney is to acquire a 43 percent stake in Infoseek, in an agreement announced June 18. In return, Infoseek is acquiring Starwave, which runs ABCnews.com and ESPN.com as a joint venture with Disney. A new portal service featuring content from all these players is promised for later this year.

NBC has agreed to purchase a 19 percent stake in Cnet's Snap search service, with an option to increase its share to 60 percent. The move gives NBC a toehold in the current portal mania sweeping the web; it also turns Snap from a Cnet liability into a new crown jewel. The announcement came on June 9.

The articles below provide more details about specific deals and the merging of old and new.

An interesting new directory was launched on June 5 that is produced by a staff of volunteer editors.

Called NewHoo, the idea is that by enlisting people from across the web to serve as editors, the service will better be able to keep up with listing requests and changes that produce backlogs and dead links at services such as Yahoo.

The service is a pet project created and supported by two California-based computer programmers, Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel. Its inspiration is derived from the GNU project, the long-standing volunteer effort to produce a free, UNIX-like operating system.

In fact, the service was originally launched as GnuHoo, but the name was changed in order to avoid confusion with the project.

Building a directory requires a category framework, and for that, NewHoo turned to Usenet.

"We toyed with the Dewey Decimal System, but it didn't really seem to fit well with the content on the web. Eventually we hit on the idea of using a list of Usenet groups as an outline for our category structure. That would provide representative breadth for what people talked about on the Internet. I took a long list of groups and hand-edited them into a hierarchy," Skrenta said.

The next challenge was filling this framework, but converts have been signing up in droves. The site now boasts over 400 editors, who have categorized 31,000 sites into 3,900 categories. In contrast, Yahoo's surfer staff is in the 80-person range, with over 750,000 sites categorized. Skrenta said they hope to scale the system so that it can handle between 10,000-100,000 editors.

Much of NewHoo definitely feels empty, as could be expected. But there are a few pockets where the listings have more depth than at Yahoo.

NewHoo hopes that these pockets will become the norm, as a large staff means that each editor has more time to spend covering a particular category. It also helps that many volunteers already have an interest or an expertise in the areas they cover, Skrenta said.

Some may also think that NewHoo sounds familiar to the Mining Company model, which is a network of over 500 specialty sites maintained by independent specialists.

The main difference is that the Mining Company is not a search service, though it is often seen in that light. Actual content resides within its sites, and link lists are only a part of that. In contrast, NewHoo is an attempt to categorize the web, not to provide topical content.

With a staff of volunteers, there's always the fear that editors could enlist to promote their own sites. This has already happened, Skrenta said, but the volunteer community is policing itself.

"We have had some instances of editors signing up just so they could list their own site and put a 'cool' icon next to it. Other editors complain when they notice such abuses, so the peer-review system seems to be working so far," Skrenta explained.

Want to become an editor? Applying is easy. Search for an existing category that you'd like to edit, and if it has no editor, apply using the "Become an Editor" link at the top of the category page. You can tell if an editor exists by looking at the bottom right-hand corner of the page, where the editor's screen name is displayed.

In fact, this is one of my favorite features of NewHoo. Clicking on the screen name brings up the name and email address of the person responsible for the particular area. This makes it easy to get in contact with them, and because there are so many, they are not as likely to be as overwhelmed by mail as would be the case for Yahoo editors.

If a category has an editor, you can still apply to edit a subcategory. Simply follow the same procedure, but on the application form, indicate a proposed name for the new subcategory.

Centraal has raised the fee to register a name in its RealNames alternative addressing system from $40 to $100 per year, effective today.

The company says the move is being made to better reflect the value it feels the names are providing, especially in light of the traffic the names are now generating though its partnership with AltaVista.

To date, the system is resolving 3.5 million requests per week, with 95 percent of those coming from AltaVista and the remainder from browsers equipped with the RealNames plug in.

AltaVista lists a RealNames link at the top of its search results, for any search of three words or less. Clicking on the RealNames link takes a person directly to a site that has registered a particular name, or to the RealNames search engine, when a name has not been registered or is so generic that registration is not allowed.

At the moment, the split is even: about half clicking on the RealNames listings at AltaVista go directly to a site, while the other half gets to the search engine, according to Geni McPherson, Centraal's Vice President of Communications.

Among the most popular names being resolved from AltaVista are ford, quake, disney, sony playstation, yahoo, hotmail, windows, and leonardo, McPherson said.

Previously, there was an upper traffic limit of 10,000 resolutions per month, per name, though only about 20 percent of names were expected to approach this figure, Centraal estimates.

Those doing so should pay an additional fee for extra traffic, but the limit is being waived entirely for 1998, as a result of the higher fees. After 1998, Centraal will negotiate a flat rate with sites that experience exceptionally high usage.

McPherson said talks are continuing with both Netscape and Microsoft about integrating RealNames into future versions of their browsers, as well as with other search engines to supplement their listings.

"Being on AltaVista has made us very real to the marketplace," McPherson said. The recent Netscape Smart Browsing initiative has also helped, she says. "It's demonstrated to other players the way the market is going to develop."

It was beta hype with both Netscape's and Microsoft's navigational offerings in June, and expect hype to continue as both play catch up with the likes of Yahoo, Excite and the other search-based services.

In mid-June, Netscape announced its revamped Netcenter site was in beta, and it got lots of press. Then the site went live yesterday, so it was time for more headlines. Meanwhile, Netscape says its still has much more planned.

Pop over and take a look at what the folks at Excite have built for their new partner Netscape. I expect to do a review in the next newsletter.

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced it also had a beta site for its revamped Start site. The strange thing was that the beta site didn't look very different than the live site. Then the beta link stopped working altogether, taking people instead to the main Start site.

The beta test was apparently only to test speed improvements, which have now been incorporated into the main site. It does feel a bit faster. Other features, such as the promised Inktomi-powered search engine, are still down the line.

When I last reviewed Alexa, I found it a remarkable product. The latest release for Internet Explorer 4 makes it even easier to begin using this useful tool

The first advantage is the incredibly small size: 45K. It takes longer to load some web pages than this program, which previously was a 900K download.

The second plus is that the Alexa toolbar now floats within the main browser window, at the bottom of the screen. This makes it far more useable than when it floated outside the browser.

From the toolbar, you can continue to select from the main Alexa options, slightly renamed from the older version. "Stats" provides interesting statistics about the web page you are viewing. "Links" suggests web sites with content similar to the page you are viewing.

Selecting either of these causes a new pane to open in the browser, to the left of the page displayed. The pane conveniently displays stats or link information.

About the only drawback is for those who like to open multiple windows. If you turn Alexa off during a session, then open a new window, the Alexa toolbar returns. You must close it again in each new window. This is annoying for me, because I constantly open new windows. For others, it may not be a problem. A fix is promised for the future.

Alexa 1.4 remains available for those using Netscape browsers or Internet Explorer 3.

Infoseek is no longer listing sites submitted to it within minutes. Instead, it now takes between one to three days for pages to appear.

The change is a result of a massive wave of submissions that have followed since Infoseek launched its Extra Search Precision algorithm in May.

"We saw a huge spike the week we released ESP, because basically, everyone is trying to figure out how the new algorithm works," said Nilo Zaratan, who oversees the Infoseek spidering process. "The number of submissions has increased quite significantly, up to about 30,000 to 50,000 per day."

The increased traffic meant that Infoseek could no longer process submissions as quickly in the past. In turn, it began receiving complaints from site owners. "People would call us within an hour and say, you still haven't indexed my site," Zaratan said.

To ease these expectations, Infoseek now says on its Add URL form that pages will be added by the next business day. That means up to two days, unless you submit on a Friday, when the next business day is three days away.

Zaratan said that faster processing may eventually return, but even with a two or three-day delay, Infoseek still remains close to HotBot and AltaVista, in terms of speediness. At those services, pages take one to two days to appear. In contrast, pages submitted to Excite and Lycos can take three weeks or longer to appear.

Yahoo introduced a Spanish-language edition of its guide called Yahoo en Espaqol on June 8. The service features more than 5,000 sites from 20 Spanish-speaking countries, as well as news, business, sports and entertainment information.

Excite has begun offering its own branded Internet access service, Excite Online, in conjunction with AT&T. The service launched on June 11. It offers 150 hours of access for $14.95 per month, within the US.

Excite Event Finder is a new feature at the service to allow users to find concerts, festivals, movies, sporting events, plays and events throughout the US. Listings are drawn from more than 20 web sites, including TicketMaster, EventCal and PlayBill.

Also, Excite is now offering online auctions within its site. It will be free to place an auction ad for the next two months, and auction items will receive premium positioning within the Excite Classifieds area.

Researcher Susan Feldman summarizes the state of search engines in 1998, finding they have generally improved from last year. Lots of useful tips and a great chart of features, designed with the researcher in mind.

The U.K. Supreme Court has granted permission in part for Google to appeal against a ruling relating to a dispute over the user information through cookies via use of the Apple Safari browser.
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